


but when you give, oh my

by smithens



Series: si l'on n'a pas de soleil, il faut en faire un [4]
Category: Downton Abbey
Genre: 1920s, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Family Issues, Gen, Home, Married Life, Nurses & Nursing, References to Illness, Winter
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-02-10
Updated: 2021-02-12
Packaged: 2021-03-16 17:55:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,304
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29336391
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/smithens/pseuds/smithens
Summary: The question of whether or not to cross burnt bridges has no easy answer.
Relationships: Thomas Barrow & Sybil Crawley
Series: si l'on n'a pas de soleil, il faut en faire un [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2051889
Comments: 19
Kudos: 61





	1. Sybil

" _...has made formal announcement of the engagement of her granddaughter, the Lady Mary Josephine Crawley of Downton Abbey, eldest daughter of the Earl of Grantham, to Mr Matthew Crawley, son of the late Mr Reginald Crawley and Mrs Crawley_... _during the war Mr Crawley served as a Captain in the Duke of Manchester's Own…_ well, it just keeps going on, really."

Thomas lays the spread flat out on the table and jabs at the relevant section of the Society column before returning to his breakfast.

Sybil finishes her toast before tugging the newspaper over and turning it round to find it's exactly as he said: quite a lot of words, and more details than she finds proper—though, she's come to understand that what she finds proper is hardly universal. Still, she has to wonder if her parents had a chance to review it before it was published.

At the very end...

" _The bride and bridegroom will be married in a local ceremony in March,_ " she reads.

"At least we found out before the papers," Thomas says lightly. He takes a sip of his tea that feels pointed. It reminds her of her coffee, which has already gone cold. "Would've been nice to be invited properly, though."

By her parents, he means.

She can't fathom why. "I thought you didn't want to go," she says, pointed in return. She straightens out her fork and knife over her empty plate, first English, then American, then continental, before rising to take her dishes to the kitchen. 

"Not particularly," Thomas calls after her once her back is turned, "but I wouldn't've thought your mother'd stoop that low, leaving you off the guest list…"

Always a matter of principle, with him.

On full blast the tap water is still ice cold over her fingers; she dries off her hand on her skirt apron (she's _got_ to mend that habit before they go home) and keeps it running on low pressure to warm up. They've been letting it drip for the past few days, so the pipes don't freeze. Ida from college had recommended that… just another of those things she'd never had to mind or worry about before she left Downton.

Standing here waiting for the water to warm simply for the luxury of doing the washing up she worries about the people in tenements who don't have boilers to begin with. 

It dawns on her that her mother may have considered these things once. When she was very little. Or—no, probably not, but _her_ mother might have, though it's almost impossible to imagine Grandmama fretting about anything, no matter how young she had been once. She simply isn't the fretting sort.

"It wasn't Mama's fault," Sybil murmurs, more to reassure herself than him. She knows because she'd written about it, and so had Edith, and Granny, and even Cousin Isobel, who in addition to having a good many things to say had seemed keen to try and wire them the money for the journey if she could only determine how. (Sybil didn't say yes to that, but she didn't exactly refuse, either.)

The invitation itself came from Mary and Matthew, in a regular old letter, informal in all respects. 

But no matter if everyone else in all the county wanted her there, in all the _country,_ it wouldn't matter _to her_ , not truly, unless...

"Not _only_ hers," says Thomas, from right beside her. She almost flinches; he reaches across her to stack their breakfast dishes in the sink. Judging by the scrunch of his face when he sticks his hand under the faucet, the water is still cold. He takes an apron off the nail on the wall and looks at her expectantly as he ties it round his waist.

"...She doesn't stand up to him."

"Do mothers ever stand up to fathers?"

"They do their best," she replies, even to her own ears sounding needlessly defensive. It's hardly an attack on her person.

"Well, their best could be better."

And she's not the only one between them who's been left out of family affairs. He's speaking from the heart; she can be sure of that.

Sybil sighs. "We knew all along this would happen," she tells him, perfectly collected. All she has to do is remember to breathe. "There's no use being surprised now."

It's all well and good to say that she knew, but in hindsight, she didn't _understand_ … that's the true problem.

"I'm not surprised," says Thomas. His nonchalance seems much more fake than hers does. "Just I wondered if maybe he'd get over himself for your sake, and it doesn't speak well of him that he hasn't."

Whenever he speaks about her father he trips over his pronouns… It's a very sweet thing to say, and deep-down she agrees with him entirely, but she still feels as though she ought to protest for the sake of it.

She won't, but she _feels_ like she should.

"Anyway," Thomas goes on, nudging her away from the sink and taking a dishrag in hand, "I'm very happy for them, Lady Mary and Matthew I mean, took them long enough, so once we work out how we're going to pay for it…"

He's said it more than once in the last few weeks but every time she still feels as if she could kiss him.

"—aren't you going in to lectures this morning? I thought you'd be out the door by now."

It's after seven now; the sky is slowly but surely brightening. She misses Christmas at Downton, and the New Year, the Servants' Ball, but _not_ winter in Yorkshire. She'd never known what a difference a longer day could make until they came here. 

"I'm on the wards tonight," she answers, gratefully accepting the change in subject. "Frances is poorly, so we swapped the other day—I thought I told you."

"You probably did and my mind's just going," Thomas replies. She rolls her eyes. "Night shift for me, too." 

That makes her feel better, then, they can walk together...

"Just tonight?"

"Tonight and tomorrow... Think it'll've let up by the time we go?"

In unison they turn toward the window. The panes are fogged over. Once she manages to turn the latch and thrust it open, Thomas assisting with a push, there is a rush of icy air that burns her cheeks and makes her eyes water. A dislodged heap of snow falls to the floor; sleet strikes the glass with continuous _clinks_.

They shut it.

"Blimey," Thomas murmurs. He rubs at his eyes, takes a deep breath. They probably shouldn't have let the cold inside—and yet even as she shivers there is something incredible about it; something new and exciting (though, she is _not_ looking forward to the walk to the station that evening). "You ever seen anything like this before?"

Sybil shakes her head, awed. "I don't think it does this in England."


	2. Thomas

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thank you so much for the comments you guys are so nice :'-) <3 <3 <3

The snow comes up past his ankles and nearly to her knees. Shovelling that morning was a waste of bloody time.

The whole street came together to take care of it, though. Reminded him of home some, back when the neighborhood was fond of him—when he was a little boy, really. But at home they never piled slush into two foot heaps and dumped salts on the pavement. Nobody ever sang foreign songs or shouted from their dormer windows and balconies (they didn't _have_ balconies). If he's ever in Italy in winter he'll know a few useful words for the weather, he supposes. After months making nice with everybody on the block Sybil's got more of a proper vocabulary than he has, so she'll have to be their guide whenever they go to far off places in the future. 

The walk shouldn't take more than five minutes; between the wind, sleet, ice and sludge it takes fifteen—and that's without a moving car in sight. Even with two gloves on and lots of finger flexing his hand is fucking killing him. While they hang about in a crowded corner of the station getting pelted with sleet waiting for somebody who knows what's going on to show up and say something, Sybil holds it between two hands and presses in pulses. 

"Worried about the ambulances in this," he tells her, shivering.

"Oh, _no_ , I hadn't even thought of that."

"Nothing we can do about it."

He bends his fingers over hers, straightens them, bends them again. Last thing he needs at the moment is a useless extremity.

"Not about _that,_ but you really should get on," she says through chattering teeth, "Won't it take ages to walk? You don't want to be late."

" _You_ don't want to be stranded here all evening."

She rolls her eyes. "I don't think it will be _all_ evening…"

"It's gonna be at least an hour, ma'am," interrupts a stranger, "and they didn't even let everyone on the last one, a whole bunch of us missed it—you're not from here, are you? Where are you headed?"

They stare at him.

"Not Brooklyn," says Thomas flatly.

"We've lived here for a little more than a year now," Sybil says, poised, polite and with a smile. "I'm only going to 23rd Street," and then they have a chat while they stand there getting snowed on, and when she finally gets round to asking about if the subway is going— 

"Not on time!" says somebody else, a woman bundled up in so many layers all he can see is her eyes.

But it won't be _more_ than an hour wait, according to the crowd at _that_ station.

Which would be all well and good if she had an hour to spare. She can't spare half. 

"It's _underground_ ," Thomas complains, just for the sake of it. He's got a brain; he's sure there are plenty of problems all stacked up at once to put everything to a halt like this, but Sybil won't bother expressing her feelings about anything as unsophisticated as public transport at all and certainly not out in the open, so he's got to let out the frustration for her. "What's happened, an avalanche?"

That's when yet another stranger informs them that their eyes weren't deceiving them and neither the streetcars nor the buses are on, either, which mucks up the whole last part of her itinerary no matter how they work the first bit out.

"I'll walk, then," Sybil says definitively. 

"You're not walking in this, are you mad?"

"Well, you're walking to Saint Vincent's."

"Yes, 'cause it takes ten minutes and I do it every day."

Ten minutes if he's lazy. It'll probably take triple that now and he'll want to boil himself once he's there, but triple _her_ walk would be what, an hour and a half? Two? A young woman alone in the dark and freezing with abandoned cars and carriages strewn about everywhere? It's not happening, not if he has his say.

They brave the street again to find a shop with a public telephone. Lo and behold there's a wait there, too, because everybody and his mother has to ring some place to say the trains are late.

He doesn't look at his watch, himself. All that'll do is give him another thing to fuss about when the first thing on his mind ought to be getting Sybil back to the house safe and sound. No point in asking permission to be tardy when he's going to be anyway—though, that's no excuse for giving no warning at all. Of course, one look at everybody on line is enough to decide they've probably got the picture whether he sends word or not. So they wait on their feet for ages until she gets her turn with the telephone, and then he stands rubbing his hands together pretending he can't hear every word through the receiver as she speaks to the night matron. People here talk too loud to begin with but that woman still manages to be worse than everybody else he's met this side of the Atlantic. 

(He might be biased.)

He can't really believe that they don't need her there, not with everything going on, but he's not going to complain that the woman didn't demand she wait ages for some kind of vehicle to get her anywhere close to where she needs to be and then either wait again or walk the width of Manhattan unaccompanied to end up there. It turned out better than he'd have dared hope.

This problem would never happen somewhere like London; he's sure of it.

He tries to telephone the ward after all before they go, his conscience (and the obsession over a job-well-done he's never been able to chuck) biting him, but like several before them he can't even get through to an operator so all it ends up being is a waste of time and money.

"But you _are_ going to be late," Sybil reminds him as they step out onto the street, unnecessarily. 

"I'm already late."

Not by too much, though. Hopefully they'll understand and forgive him.

"Precisely."

"Open your eyes, Sybil, I don't think anybody round here's making it to work on time."

Or home, as that's where most people go at this hour.

They can't sack him, besides; he's indispensable.

Despite her protesting he walks her back to the house and ends up glad to have done it, too, because she slips on the stairs on their way up—you can't even _see_ the ice but it's got to be at least an inch thick—and nearly cracks her head right open on the wrought-iron railing.

Fortunately he's there to catch her before her skull splits. She ends up just with scrapes to her palms where she caught herself—bloody, painful, but no threat to life and limb.

Once they're inside and he's got her sitting in front of the stove dabbing antiseptic on the cuts his heart is still pounding from the stress of it all.

"Get some rest while I'm gone, all right?"

"I slept all afternoon," she says, ill-tempered. Forgive him if he doesn't want her to freeze to death on her way to the East Side. (What a gift that would be to the injured and ailing—she's not exactly superfluous, herself.) 

"What I mean is, don't go making house calls." He finishes wrapping the gauze around her hand and snips it to stick a pin at her wrist. Her poor gloves are shredded. He'll have to see if he can do something about that for her when he gets back. "And leave that on til you have to change it."

"I wasn't going to take it off."

If she pouts, he'll just pout back. Nobody wins.

Thomas sighs. "I promise the hospital will still be there when this is over."

"I shouldn't have offered to cover for her if I couldn't make it."

"How were you to know this place couldn't handle a snowstorm?"

They hadn't even known there'd _be_ a snowstorm, or at least, not one half as bad as this, though he supposes that serves them right for not reading Sunday's paper til Thursday. But they're busy people; it gets hard to keep up when you've got to buy it off the corner from a newsboy every morning.

Sybil huffs, a frizzy strand of hair floating away from her face and then falling back to her cheek for her to tuck it behind her ear for the fifth time in a row. "And it would have been nice to have the money."

Oh.

"Don't worry about that," he mutters.

"She's already angry with me for taking half of March off." 

"What's she going to do, kick you off the course for having a sister?"

Sybil doesn't have anything to say to that.

"Dock your pay?" They only give her wages for one or two days a week to begin with—it's exploitation is what it is; even not having been graduated she's more qualified than half the women working the wards full time. Years more experience. At least they let her skip a term or she'd've been bored out of her mind their whole first year. "And you're not _taking it off_ , not if you're sending in your papers by post."

She worked all December; she'll probably work all June, too. They can manage without her.

And if they can't, they should just give her a bloody diploma already and hire her properly.

"I thought we said you were already late?" Sybil retorts.

If they had all the time in the world he'd reassure her that she's not useless no matter what she's thinking and that probably hundreds if not thousands of other people are finding themselves arriving late or not-at-all to the places expecting them and it's neither a stain on their character nor skin off their back… They don't, so he just pats her on the wrist and says, "that we did," before standing to get to putting on all the layers he just shucked off a few minutes ago.

"Be safe," she says later as she presses his key into his palm. Hopefully her hands aren't torn up too bad. It didn't look comfortable when he was bandaging her up, to say the least.

"Trudged through worse," he replies flippantly, but he adds, "I will be, I promise," before he actually shuts the door. Sybil locks it from the inside. 

What a journey he's got ahead of him... _Worse_ was worse, full stop, but the dark and the cold and the being-alone aren't making it an easy task.

For better or worse he makes it there eventually. "Oh, thank _God_ you're here," Howard says as soon as they cross paths, following him into the changing room, "Williston never showed up; I bet he can't get over."

Which means Thomas is going to have to push through some heavy lifting his hand won't thank him for later. 

He starts shedding his clothing. Getting the heavy (and wet, though luckily only on the outside) coat off makes him feel warmer within seconds. Whoever was responsible for snap fasteners back in the day is a life-saver and no mistake.

"I need a damn _break,_ " adds Howard, and it's enough to have him feeling guilty for not giving sufficient notice—though, it wasn't _his_ fault. 

"None of the H&M trains are going on schedule," Thomas says, and predictably, Howard acts like him saying a word different is the best thing he's heard all day, his eyes brightening up. Given he probably hasn't been hearing many good things at all lately Thomas will let it go. (Plus it doesn't bother him as much as it used to, after so many months, now that he doesn't get laughed at.) "So he's not getting under, neither—how about Lerner?"

Surely somebody who lives on site...

"She's in the Bronx all week, didn't you hear? Her brother has the 'flu."

Him and every other railroad man in the boroughs, apparently. Bad timing. Thomas takes the words as a needed prompt to put on gloves and tie on a mask, in opposite order.

"—say, why are _you_ late? Don't you live just around the corner?"

Not _just_...

"Sybil couldn't make it to Bellevue," he answers. "I rang but the line was tied up."

Howard's brow creases but he doesn't seem surprised. "She takes the Sixth L, right?"

"Doesn't matter what she takes, they've cocked up all of it." At this Howard laughs, despite the fact that it was not intended to be funny. After months of practice Thomas still hasn't figured out how to get fond irritation across with his mouth and nose covered so he just tilts his head at him and waits. "But yes, usually she does, at night at least—wasn't gonna let her walk in this, though."

_Look at me, aren't I normal, telling my wife what to do and not do…_

"I don't blame you—Knowles said in emergency they've got their hands full with hypothermia."

Just what he needs, is to think about that some more after he finally got it out of his head.

"...don't worry about that, though, you're on the pneumonia ward again."

He hadn't expected anything different.

* * *

He stays nearly three hours past the end of his shift even though he was hardly late one. By nine o' clock he's dead on his feet.

"Was it very bad?" Sybil asks as soon as he's through the door. A 'hello' would have been nice, but she takes his hat from his head and unwinds his scarf for him before he can even blink, and that suffices. He is happy to see she has new gauze over her palms, that her face is bright and her hair is done up, which hopefully means she got some sleep and had time to take care of herself on top of it.

She knows the answer to her question already, though. 

"Cases are going down, officially," he answers. It's true as the real answer would be, but unlike that one it's something to be pleased about. She nods but from the look in her eyes he thinks she gets the picture. "Only they're worried with the weather like this they'll go back up again."

She's been up against it too, after all. No need to bring it home when they don't have to.

"Everybody inside…"

"Yes, and you know what housing here's like."

The two of them are lucky they moved out of that rat trap or this winter would have been a heck of a lot worse.

She changes the subject, sort of, which is kind of her: "Matthew says the building industry is booming at home."

Home, home. Now that they're confident they're going back to Downton (long as their pockets allow it—soon as this blows over they'll have to determine that for certain so they can either pay up the rest of the fare or get what they put down refunded, because they _definitely_ can't afford to forfeit) she says the word more and more.

He doesn't know a thing about _home_ , himself. Not where it should be nor where it is.

Here is the closest he's ever come, but it's too different to what he grew up with for him to think of it like that all the way down. Too foreign. They may speak the same language—well, some of them do—but they don't do it in the same ways. 

"Because of the soldiers," Sybil adds.

He'd heard about that, somewhere. Can't remember where, though. "Most people don't grow up in houses with three hundred rooms."

"I'm sure _Matthew_ knows that..."

 _Matthew_ would.

"Everybody knows that," Thomas says, "doesn't mean we see it all the same way, though, does it?"

Even he's got a different perspective now, living some place as squashed and tight together as Manhattan, and he wasn't what he'd call fond of the aristocracy to begin with. Fond of their continued offerings of employment, certainly. But not of the class in itself.

While he freshens up he does his best _not_ to think about how he's going to have a front row seat to all that again shortly, choosing instead to focus on how as soon as he eats he can draw the curtains and sleep for ten entire hours if he likes, and also the fact that her and Matthew apparently discuss economics in their trans-Atlantic missives.

There is a hot cup of tea waiting for him when he comes back out.

Him and her swap who does what for keeping house at random and in a fashion that wouldn't make much sense to most people but it is always very nice to come home and find she's already put the kettle on. He does the same, when he can, but even so.

"They've cancelled lectures," Sybil tells him, setting a plate of toast on the table before returning to the range. "I telephoned from Mr Hansen's shop." 

She must've got bread when she was there, too, because there wasn't any when they left the house the day before. 

He's starving, so that's also very nice. 

"Go on," he says. 

"So I'm going to look in on the Taylors, and then Mr and Mrs Marino, and probably the Walkers, too."

And a dozen others after them, he's sure. At this point she's practically the family doctor of everybody on the block. "The ones on Bleecker Street or ours?"

"Bleecker Street."

"How's the baby?"

"Better, last time, but I'd like to be sure." She passes him the day's paper. "The women at Barnard are shovelling snow."

"The _women at Barnard_ are doing a lot of things lately," he says, eyebrows raised. One of the girls (because that's what the headline's calling them, which he's sure she's unhappy about) on the page catches his eye. "That's not Ruby, is it?"

"Is it?" says Sybil, doing a very bad job of pretending like she could care less, "I didn't look very long."

A lie if he's ever heard one; she was probably poring over it right up til he turned the key in the lock. The photograph is blotchy but he's seen the woman under all kinds of lighting and it's definitely her, though far as he can tell the article doesn't name any names. (It's a bit condescending about the whole thing, actually, not that he cares where this one's concerned.) "Didn't think she was that sort," he says lightly.

Prissy little heartbreaker.

"You don't like when people say _that sort_ about you, so you shouldn't say it about her."

He may deserve that, but still, facts are facts… 

"She's probably just trying to impress someone," Sybil mutters to herself. 

Thomas hides his smile with his teacup.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>   * I had to go look up 1920s-1930s American audio because I forgot how we (American anglophones) talk
>   * The Mid-Atlantic snowstorm in February 1920 did shut down or drastically delay transportation in New York in all boroughs from all directions at varying times over the 3-4 days it was occurring, especially on elevated trains and surface routes. Lines that were running were overcrowded, which increased door-to-door travel times. Improvement to street and transport conditions was slow and haphazard because the winter 1920 wave of the flu pandemic (the fourth and final in New York) had affected a lot of those workers. That said, I took an artistic liberty (and am also relying on none of you spending hours going through 1920 newspapers like I did) because the more reputable reports of the time indicate that by some point Manhattan wasn't quite as affected as is depicted here, especially on the subways. That said, since the street cars and buses were largely not running, Sybil would still have had to walk at night through snow and ice both on the ground (snowdrifts are described as "knee deep" or "almost knee deep" in multiple articles) and falling from the sky in an ankle length dress a route that would have taken around 30 minutes in the daytime on asphalt to get to where she is going (and that's after getting off an underground or elevated train). 
>   * The long waiting times and busy telephone lines were also yanked from real life. It was reported that ~2,000 operators were not working due to influenza, which wasn't helpful when thousands of people wanted to use both public and private telephones to indicate that they couldn't be somewhere.
>   * I am sure all of the Barnard College students who helped out to clear the Broadway Avenue and 117th Street, etc, intersections of snow drifts were very nice women to whom Thomas's description does not apply
>   * Reserving tickets for Transatlantic transportation either on credit or with a refundable-under-conditions reservation fee was a thing at some point in time in some places but I didn't bother to do more research into that because it works here, so no idea if that was going on in this time and place specifically. (If you paid in full you could usually get a refund up to three weeks before departure though; I did check on that.)
>   * I don't know if Bellevue specifically allowed nursing students to be married, to live off-site, or to skip preparatory terms based upon prior (mostly war-related) experience, but there were a few nursing colleges that did. I imagine all three at one place would have been rare so this is me taking artistic liberties. I do know that they had a more equitable and less exploitative division of study and work for their students compared to other colleges, with a higher emphasis on classroom-education and observation (of both experienced nurses as well as doctors and surgeons) than on using students as free unskilled labor.
>   * There were 1,298 new cases of influenza and 437 new cases of pneumonia reported in Manhattan alone on February 5 1920. Contemporary reports say that the 1919-1920 wave of the pandemic in New York was much milder than that of September-November 1918, but modern sources are telling me otherwise.
> 


**Author's Note:**

> > goodnight, New York New York  
> goodnight, goodnight  
> I’ll see you all on the other side  
> after I am a different man with different eyes  
> goodnight, you canyons of steel and light  
> twist and turn where your alleyways hide  
> swaying trains sheltering dreams and little white lies
>> 
>> goodnight, goodnight  
> may you be always heartbreaking  
> take a little more than you give  
> yeah but when you give, oh my  
> goodnight, goodnight  
> I walk away to remember who I am
> 
> — Vienna Teng, "Goodnight New York"
> 
> * * *
> 
> find me on tumblr as [@combeferre](https://combeferre.tumblr.com). 
> 
> i also have [a carrd](https://smithensy.carrd.co/) now!


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